Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

It happened in stages, and I only understood their order afterward.

First her pupils. There is no white in a succubus’s eye, so the change was all in the black — the vertical slit widening, then widening again, until almost nothing amber was left around it. Her head moved back an inch, the way you move when a light comes on too close.

Then the breath. She had been breathing evenly since she arrived, the controlled rhythm of somebody who has spent decades not letting a room see anything. That went. Her chest rose against the gold plates of the collar chain and stayed high, and the second breath came faster than the first.

Then her wings opened. Not a stretch — a single involuntary snap that put the tips almost to both benches, and the draught of it lifted dust off the concrete and pushed the hair back off my forehead. Her tail came up off the floor and curled hard, once.

And the soulfire came back wrong. Not on her hand this time. It bled out along her collarbones and down her forearms in thin crawling lines, low and dark and stuttering, as though something had been kicked over inside her and was leaking.

"What—" she said, and stopped, and I have thought about that broken word a great many times since.

The pressure in the workshop changed. That’s the only honest way I can put it, because I don’t have the vocabulary for what she did and she never gave it to me. The air got heavier and warmer and closer. The burnt-sugar smell that had come in with her thickened until I could taste it at the back of my throat, and it stopped smelling like scorched iron and started smelling like skin.

My mouth went dry. That was the first thing that was mine and not hers.

The second thing was that I looked at her — properly, with none of the discipline I’d been holding since she arrived — and found that I could not remember why I had been keeping the lid on the box.

That’s not me, I thought, and the thought had the right words in it and none of the right force. It arrived like something read off a list.

"Step back," I said. My voice came out wrong. "Whatever that is. Stop looking."

"I am trying." She said it through her teeth, and the imperious edge was gone out of her entirely, and that frightened me more than the fire had. "You are — what are you. Nothing carries this. Nothing walks around carrying this—"

"Nyssara."

"Your soul’s life-force is packed." Her hand came up, not toward me, toward her own sternum, pressing there like something had lodged behind it. "Layered. Dense as a war-saint’s and sitting in a body that a fever could kill. And over the top of it—" Her breath broke. "Over the top of it there is a fire, and I looked directly into it."

I understood about a third of that at the time. What I understood with no effort at all was the way she was standing: weight forward, wings still open, hands empty, her whole body pointed at me like a needle that has found its north and cannot be argued out of it.

I made myself take a step backward. I got one. My heel found the base of the bench, and I turned my head to break the line of sight because it was the last mechanical thing available to me, and the room came apart while I was turning.

There was no transition. That’s the part I’ve never been able to describe properly. One instant the concrete was under my boots and the light was coming through the roller door at a low angle, and the next there was no concrete, no door, no light from anywhere in particular, and I was standing on something warm.

This is a dream. The thought was perfectly clear. It also carried no weight at all, which was, I would learn, the entire point.

Because it wasn’t a dream the way sleep gives you one. Everything had its full complement of detail. Air moved over my forearms and I could feel the linen wrap on the left one, slightly too tight where I’d done it one-handed at the hall. My palms still stung. The bruise still ran shoulder to hip and still complained when I shifted my weight. Every injury I owned had come with me, exactly, which meant this place had taken the real body’s report and built from it.

The space resolved around me by degrees. Dark red hangings covered three stone walls. A low couch sat opposite a brazier that gave off heat without smoke, and the dusty floor shifted slightly beneath my boots. There was no door. I walked to the nearest wall, pressed my palm against it, and felt cold stone to my knuckles.

This is not a place. This is inside something.

Nyssara stood four paces away in the same coat and half-fallen coil of hair. Here, her soulfire ran beneath her skin in narrow black-crimson veins. Her wings had folded close, and she was breathing as though holding them there required effort.

"This is a domain," she said. "Mine. It opened without my ordering it."

"Then close it."

"I am attempting to."

She moved both hands through a shape I couldn’t follow. The hangings snapped outward although there was no wind, the stone behind them shivered, and for an instant I saw the workshop through it: bench, roller door, afternoon light. Then the domain sealed again.

Nyssara swore in a language the link refused to translate.

"Time runs differently here," she said. Her voice had dropped lower, its edges softened by something she was fighting. "Near enough three minutes inside for one outside. Your manifestation counter still runs at the world’s pace. The domain does not extend it."

"How long until you can close it?"

"I don’t know." The admission appeared to cost her. "I have not lost hold of an instinct since I was ninety-one years old."

She tried again. The brazier guttered. A crack of white workshop light opened beside her shoulder, no wider than a finger, and closed before either of us could reach it.

The glamour thickened while she worked.

It didn’t feel like an order. That would have been easier. It felt like my own wanting, stripped of the reasons I might refuse it. I remembered that she was dangerous and that I had agreed to soul-sight, nothing more. I knew something was pressing on my judgment. Every fact arrived intact and failed to move me.

"Nyssara."

"I know."

"Whatever this is, I’m not agreeing to it."

"I know," she said again.

Her control broke on the last word.

She crossed two of the four paces before catching herself. Her hands closed so hard that the talons pressed into her palms. The soulfire beneath her skin surged brighter, then dimmed as she forced it down.

I could have stepped away. There was open floor behind me and my legs still worked. I didn’t move, and I cannot honestly say how much of that was the glamour and how much was the attraction that had been mine from the second she appeared. The uncertainty was already becoming part of what happened.

"Say something," I said.

"What would you like me to say?"

"Anything. I need to know whether you still sound like yourself."

That reached her. For a moment I saw the ruler who had dissected a coup while standing in a foreign workshop with twelve minutes to spare.

"I sound," she said carefully, "like a duchess about to make an error."

"Then don’t."

"Tell me to leave you."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

She waited one beat, perhaps hoping I would manage it on the second attempt. I didn’t. The glamour had not placed desire in me; it had made every objection feel remote and needlessly complicated. Underneath it, entirely my own, I wanted her to close the distance.

Both things were true. Neither cancelled the other.

Nyssara lifted one hand and placed it flat against my chest. Heat spread through the cloth beneath her palm. Her face came close enough that the burnt-sugar scent crowded out the resin and hot stone, and her mouth touched the side of my throat.

"You are the strangest thing that has ever happened to me," she murmured against my skin. "And I have been alive for a very long time."

My hands found her waist. I remember that clearly because both injured palms opened against the fitted black cloth, and even the sting failed to make the rest of me reconnect. She felt the blood, glanced down, and whatever judgment should have followed never arrived.

The couch met the backs of my knees although it had been across the chamber a moment earlier. Either the domain had moved it or it had moved us. Nyssara pressed once against my chest, and I sat because resisting seemed like an idea belonging to somebody farther away.

She went down between my knees with her wings opening around us. Their dark membranes blocked the brazier until the light came mainly from the black-crimson glow under her skin.

The last coherent objection I could still reach surfaced when her fingers found the fastening of my trousers.

"Wait—"

"Yes," she said, breathless with hunger. "In a moment."

It was not an answer, and somewhere beneath the glamour I knew that. Her fingers opened the fastening anyway. She looked at me once, amber almost lost inside black, then lowered her head.

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